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THE RETURN OF THE EXILES
The old man with a hammer and the one-eyed man with a spear were
seated by the roadside talking as I came up the hill.
"It isn't as though they hadn't asked us," the one with the hammer said.
"There ain't no more than twenty as knows about it," said the other.
"Twenty's twenty," said the first.
"After all these years," said the one-eyed man with the spear. "After
all these years. We might go back just once."
"O' course we might," said the other.
Their clothes were old even for laborers, the one with the hammer
had a leather apron full of holes and blackened, and their hands
looked like leather. But whatever they were they were English, and
this was pleasant to see after all the motors that had passed me that
day with their burden of mixed and doubtful nationalities.
When they saw me the one with the hammer touched his greasy cap.
"Might we make so bold, sir," he said, "as the ask the way to
Stonehenge?"
"We never ought to go," mumbled the other plaintively. "There's
not more than twenty as knows, but...."
I was bicycling there myself to see the place so I pointed out the
way and rode on at once, for there was something so utterly servile
about them both that I did not care for their company. They seemed
by their wretched mien to have been persecuted or utterly neglected
for many years, I thought that very likely they had done long terms
of penal servitude.
When I came to Stonehenge I saw a group of about a score of men
standing among the stones. They asked me with some solemnity if
I was expecting anyone, and when I said No they spoke to me no
more. It was three miles back where I left those strange old men,
but I had not been in the stone circle long when they appeared,
coming with great strides along the road. When they saw them all
the people took off their hats and acted very strangely, and I saw
that they had a goat which they led up then to the old altar stone.
And the two old men came up with their hammer and spear and
began apologizing plaintively for the liberty they had taken in coming
back to that place, and all the people knelt on the grass before them.
And then still kneeling they killed the goat by the altar, and when the
two old men saw this they came up with many excuses and eagerly
sniffed the blood. And at first this made them happy. But soon the
one with the spear began to whimper. "It used to be men," he
lamented. "It used to be men."
And the twenty men began looking uneasily at each other, and the
plaint of the one-eyed man went on in that tearful voice, and all of
a sudden they all looked at me. I do not know who the two old men
were or what any of them were doing, but there are moments when
it is clearly time to go, and I left them there and then. And just as I
got up on to my bicycle I heard the plaintive voice of the one with the
hammer apologizing for the liberty he had taken in coming back to
Stonehenge.
"But after all these years," I heard him crying, "After all these
years...."
And the one with the spear said: "Yes, after three thousand years...."
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